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pleasure how she’d stiffened with shock when he’d appeared behind her and slipped the rope around her neck. Never a clue he’d been waiting in the corner, under the black silk, for a half hour. The surprise entrance by the police—well, that’d shaken him. But like all good illusionists Malerick had prepared an out, which he’d executed perfectly.
    He finished his breakfast and took the cup into the kitchen, washed it carefully and set it in a rack to dry. He was meticulous in all his ways; his mentor, a fierce, obsessive, humorless illusionist, had beaten discipline into him.
    The man now went into the larger of the bedrooms and put on the videotape he’d made of the site of the next performance. He’d seen this tape a dozen times and, though he virtually had it memorized, he was now going to study it again. (His mentor had also beaten into him—literally sometimes—the importance of the 100:1 rule. You rehearse one hundred minutes for every one minute onstage.)
    As he watched the tape he pulled a velvet-covered performing table toward him. Not watching his hands, Malerick practiced some simple card maneuvers: the False Dovetail Shuffle, the Three-Pile False Cut then some trickier ones: the Reverse Sliparound, the Glide and the Deal-Off Force. He ran through some actual tricks, complicated ones, like Stanley Palm’s Ghost Cards, Maldo’s famous Six-Card Mystery and several others by the famous card master and actor Ricky Jay, others by Cardini.
    Malerick also did some of the card tricks that hadbeen in Harry Houdini’s early repertoire. Most people think of Houdini as an escapist but the performer had actually been a well-rounded magician, who performed illusion—large-scale stage tricks like vanishing assistants and elephants—as well as parlor magic. Houdini had been an important influence in his life. When he first started performing, in his teens, Malerick used as a performing name “Young Houdini.” The “erick” portion of his present name was both a remnant of his former life—his life before the fire—and an homage to Houdini himself, who’d been born Ehrich Weisz. As for the prefix “Mal” a magician might suspect that it was taken from another world-famous performer, Max Breit, who performed under the name Malini. But in fact, Malerick had picked the three letters because they came from the Latin root for “evil,” which reflected the dark nature of his brand of illusion.
    He now studied the tape, measuring angles, noting windows and the location of possible witnesses, blocking out his positions as all good performers do. And as he watched, the cards in his fingers riffled together in lightning-fast shuffles that hissed like snakes. The kings and jacks and queens and jokers and all the rest of the cards slithered onto the black velvet and then seemed to defy gravity as they leaped back into his strong hands, where they vanished from sight. Watching this impromptu performance, an audience would shake their heads, half-convinced that reality had given way to delusion, that a human being couldn’t possibly do what they were observing.
    But the truth was the opposite: the card tricks Malerick was now performing absently on the plush blackcloth were not miraculous at all; they were merely carefully rehearsed exercises in dexterity and perception, governed by mundane rules of physics.
    Oh, yes, Revered Audience, what you’ve seen and what you’re about to see are very real.
    As real as fire burning flesh.
    As real as a rope knotted around a young girl’s white neck.
    As real as the circuit of the clock hands moving slowly toward the horror that our next performer is about to experience.
    •   •   •
    “Hey, there.”
    The young woman sat down beside the bed where her mother lay. Out the window in the manicured courtyard she saw a tall oak tree on the trunk of which grew a tentacle of ivy in a shape that she’d interpreted a number of ways over the past months. Today the anemic